Pond5, an online marketplace for royalty-free stock and original photos, videos and audio clips, announced Wednesday that it has raised $61 million in a Series A round of funding. The cash infusion included two investors, Palo Alto-based Accel Partners and the New York-based Stripes Group.

According to CB Insights, Pond5’s Series A is among the top five largest venture capital-backed deals for a Manhattan-based startup so far this year.

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"We’ve been thinking about doing this for a while," Pond5 CEO Tom Bennett told Crain’s. "Now we’re able to lay the foundation for an expansion that will be solid. We didn’t want to be another startup that took money without providing any value. We’re about building a sustainable marketplace that’s fair to artists, this investment will help us build on that."

Pond5’s business model is essentially a mixture of Vimeo and Etsy. The company’s site currently offers more than 15 million media clips sourced from roughly 30,000 artists around the globe. With 2.7 million royalty-free videos, Pond5 claims it is the largest collection of such videos available on the Internet.

According to Mr. Bennett and his partners, the structure of Pond5 is aimed at disrupting the stock-media business model by working with artists to set their own prices on what they create and sell using Pond5’s marketplace platform. As a nod to that "artist first" mentality, Pond5 splits all profits on sales down the middle, giving media makers an almost unheard of 50% share on sales.

"True marketplace businesses are rarely created," said Dan Marriott, Stripes Group managing partner, in a statement. "We couldn’t be more proud to support such a great story and global team headquartered here in New York City."

Pond5 employs 70 people globally. In addition to its Union Square headquarters, it maintains offices in Geneva, Switzerland and Prague, the latter of which was scooped up in Pond5’s 2013 acquisition of stock photo site Pixmac.